This week we talk about Luna 2, soft-landings, and Firefly Aerospace.

We also discuss the private space launch industry, lunar landers, and regolith.

Recommended Book: The Mercy of Gods by James S.A. Corey

Transcript

In 1959, Luna 2, a Soviet impactor-style spacecraft, successfully reached the surface of the Moon—the first-ever human-made object to do so.

Luna 2 was very of its era; a relatively simple device, similar in many ways to the better-known Sputnik satellite, but getting a craft to the moon is far more difficult than placing something in orbit around Earth, in part because of the distance involved—the Moon is about 30-Earth’s from the surface of the earth, that figure varying based on where in its elliptical orbit it is at the moment, but that’s a good average, around 239,000 miles which is about 384,000 km, while Sputnik’s orbit only took it something like 359 miles, around 578 km from the surface. That’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 670-times the distance.

So new considerations, like fuel to get there, but also charting paths to the moon that would allow the human-made object to actually hit it, rather than flying off into space, and even figuring out whether craft would need to be designed differently if they made it out of Earth’s magnetic field, were significant hurdles that had to be leapt to make this mission a success; everything was brand new, and there were gobs of unknowns.

That said, this craft didn’t settle onto the moon—it plowed into it like a bullet, a so-called ‘hard landing.’ Which was still an astonishing feet of research and engineering, as at this point in history most rockets were still blowing up before making it off the launch pad, including the projects that eventually led to the design and launch of Luna 2.

The US managed their own hard landing on the Moon in 1962, and it wasn’t until 1966 that the first soft landing—the craft slowing itself before impact, so that some kind of intact device would actually continue to exist and function on the surface of the moon—was accomplished by the Luna 9.

The Luna 9 used an ejectable capsule that was protected by airbags, which helped it survive its 34 mph, which is about 54 kmh impact. This successful mission returned the first panoramic photographs from the surface of the moon, which was another notable, historic, incredibly difficult at the time feat.

A series of rapid-fire firsts followed these initial visits, including the first-ever crewed flight to the Moon, made by the US Apollo 8 mission in 1968—that one didn’t land, but it did circle the Moon 10 times before returning to Earth, the first successful crewed mission to the surface of the Moon made by the Apollo 11 team in 1969, and by the early 70s humans had made several more moon landings: all of them were American missions, as the US is still the only country to have performed successful crewed missions to the Moon’s surface, but the Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17 missions all put people on the lunar surface, and then returned them safely to Earth.

The Luna 24, another Soviet mission launched in 1976, was the last big space race era mission to return lunar samples—chunks of moon rock and regolith—to earth, though it was a robotic mission, no humans aboard. And by many measures, the space race actually ended the previous year, in 1975, when Apollo and Soyuz capsules, US and Soviet missions, respectively, docked in orbit, creating the first international space mission, and allowing US astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts to shake hands, symbolically burying the hatchet, at least in terms of that particular, non-earthbound rivalry.

What I’d like to talk about today is a recent, successful soft landing on the lunar surface that’s historic in nature, but also contemporarily significant for several other reasons.

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Firefly Space Systems was founded in the US in 2014 by a team of entrepreneurs who wanted to compete with then-burgeoning private space companies like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic by, like these competitors, reducing the cost of getting stuff into low Earth orbit.

They were planning to become profitable within four years on the back of the also-burgeoning small satellite industry, which basically means selling space on their rockets, which are capable of carrying multiple small satellites on what’s often called a ‘rideshare’ basis, to companies and agencies that were keen to launch their own orbital assets.

These smaller satellites were becoming increasingly popular and doable because the tech required was shrinking and becoming cheaper, and that meant you no longer needed a boggling amount of money to do basic research or to lob a communications satellite into orbit; you could spent a few million dollars instead of tens or hundreds of millions, and buy space on a rocket carrying many small satellites, rather than needing to splurge on a rocket all by yourself, that rocket carrying only your giant, extremely costly and large conventional satellite.

This path, it was hoped, would provide them the benefits of economies of scale, allowing them to build and launch more rockets, which in turn would bring the costs of such rockets and launches down, over time.

And the general concept was sound—that’s basically what SpaceX has managed to do, with mammoth success, over the past decade completely rewiring how the space launch industry works; their many, reusable rockets and rocket components, and abundant launches, many of which are used to lob their own StarLink in-orbit satellites into space, while also usually carrying smaller satellites provided by clients who pay to go along for the ride, bringing all of these costs down dramatically.

So that model is basically what Firefly was aiming for, as well—but the Firefly team, which was made up of folks from Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, and other industry entities was sued by Virgin Galactic, which alleged that a former employee who left them to work for Firefly provided Firefly with intellectual property and committed what amounts to espionage, destroying data and hardware before they left.

These allegations were confirmed in 2016, and some of Firefly’s most vital customers and investors backed out, leaving the company without enough money to move forward. A second lawsuit from Virgin Orbit against Firefly and some of its people hit that same year, and that left the company insolvent, its assets put up for auction in 2017.

Those assets were bought by an investment company called Noosphere Ventures, which relaunched Firefly Space Systems as Firefly Aerospace. They then reworked the designs of their rockets a bit and relocated some of the company’s research assets to Ukraine, where the head of Noosphere Ventures is from.

They picked up a few customers in the following years, and they leased a private launch pad in Florida and another in California. In 2021, they were awarded more than $90 million to develop exploration tech for the Artemis Moon program, which was scheduled for 2023 and was meant to help develop the US’s private space industry; NASA was trying out a model that would see them hire private companies to deliver assets for a future moon-based mission, establishing long-term human presence on the moon, over the course of several years, and doing so on a budget by basically not having to build every single aspect of the mission themselves.

That same year, the head of Noosphere Ventures was asked by the US Committee on Foreign Investment to sell nearly 50% of his stake in Firefly for national security reasons; he was born in Ukraine, and the Committee was apparently concerned about so much of the company’s infrastructure being located in a country that, even before Russia invaded the following year, was considered to be a precarious spot for security-vital US research and development assets.

This is considered to be something of a scandal, as it was implied that this Ukrainian owner was himself under suspicion of maybe being a Russian asset—something that seems to have been all implication and no substance, as he’s since moved back to Ukraine and has gone on to be something of a war hero, providing all sorts of tech and other resources to the anti-invasion effort.

But back then, he complied with this request, though not at all happily—and it sounds like that unhappiness was probably justified, though there are still some classified documents on the matter that maybe say otherwise; we don’t know for sure publicly right now.

In any event, he and Noosphere sold most of their stake in Firefly to a US company called AE Industrial Partners, and the following year, in 2022 it successfully launched, for the first time, its Alpha rocket, intended to be its core launch option for small satellite, rideshare-style customers.

The satellites placed in orbit by that first launch didn’t reach their intended height, so while the rocket made it into orbit, another launch, where the satellites were placed where they were supposed to go, actually happened in 2023, is generally considered to be the first, true successful launch of the Alpha rocket.

All of which is interesting because this component of the larger space industry has been heating up; SpaceX has dominated, soaking up most of the oxygen in the room and claiming the lion’s share of available contracts. But there are quite a few private space companies from around the world profitably launching rockets at a rapid cadence, these days. And many of them are using the same general model of inexpensive rideshare rockets carrying smaller satellites into orbit, and the money from those launches then funds their other explorations, ranging from government mission components like rovers, to plans for futuristic space stations that might someday replace the aging International Space Station, to larger rockets and launch craft that might further reduce the cost of launching stuff into space, while also potentially serving as in-orbit or off-planet habitations—as is the case with SpaceX’s massive Starship craft.

This is also notable, though, because Firefly launched a lander as part of its Blue Ghost mission, to the Moon on January 15 of 2025. That craft reached the moon, and successfully soft-landed there, on March 2 the same year.

This lander was partly funded by that aforementioned 2021 Artemis award by NASA—it ultimately received just over $100 million from the agency to conduct this mission—and it was launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, as the company’s own Alpha rockets don’t yet have the right specs to launch their lander, the Blue Ghost M1; which interestingly shared space in this rocket with another lander produced by a Japanese company called ispace, whose name you might recognize, as ispace managed to get a previous lunar lander, the Hakuto-R 1, to the moon in 2023, but communication was lost with the craft a few seconds before it was scheduled to land. It was confirmed later that year that the lander crashed; though again, even just getting something to the moon is a pretty impressive feat.

So this SpaceX rocket, launched in mid-January of 2025, had two competing lunar landers on it, one made by Firefly and one made by ispace. That latter lander is scheduled to arrive on the surface sometime in early May of this year, though that might change, based on all sorts of variables. But the former, Firefly’s Blue Ghost, successfully touched-down, soft-landing on the lunar surface on March 2.

There’s another lander from Intuitive Machines—the American company that can claim to be the first to successfully soft-land on the lunar surface, but whose first effort tipped over. Their new lander could arrive as soon as March 6, just days after Blue Ghost, and it’ll be aiming for an area just 100 miles from the moon’s south pole; an area that’s of particular interest because of water ice contained in permanently shadowed areas thereabouts, which could be vital for long-term human occupation of the moon.

So things are heating up on the lunar surface these days, but soft-landing something on the moon is still an accomplishment that few nations, much less private companies, have managed.

In the past decade alone, India, Russia, and a nonprofit based in Israel have attempted and failed to achieve soft-landings, and those aforementioned Japanese and US companies managed to soft-land on the moon, but their landers tipped over, limiting the amount of research they could conduct once there. China is the only nation to have successfully achieved this feat on their first attempt, and they benefitted from decades of preexisting research and engineering know-how.

And it’s not surprising that this is such a rare feat: in addition to the incredible distances involved, the Blue Ghost lander was traveling at around 3,800 mph, which is more than 6,100 kpm just 11 minutes before it landed. It then had to slow itself down, while also adjusting its orientation in order to safely land on an uneven, crater-paved moonscape; it slowed to the pace of a slow walk just before it touched down.

Science-wise, this lander is carrying tools that will help it measure the stickiness of regolith on different materials, that will allow for more precise measurements of the distance between earth and the moon, and that will help researchers study solar winds, radiation-tolerant technologies, and the moon’s mantle. It has equipment that allowed it to detect GPS and Galileo signals from earth, which suggests these satellites might be used by craft and rovers on the moon, for navigation, at some point, and it has a drill that will allow it to penetrate the lunar regolith up to nine feet deep, among several other project assets.

This has also served as a sort of proof of concept for this lander and mission type, as another Blue Ghost lander is scheduled to launch in 2026, that one aiming for the far side of the moon, with a third currently meant to head out in 2028, destined for a currently under-explored volcanic region.

The aggregate goal of these US missions, alongside the research tools they deliver, is to eventually start building-out and supplying the necessary infrastructure for long-term human occupation of the moon, culminating with the construction of a permanently crewed base there.

These sorts of ambitions aren’t new, but this approach—funding companies to handle a lot of the legwork, rather than keeping those sorts of efforts in-house, within NASA—is novel, and it arguably recognizes the nature of the moment, which is increasingly defined by cheaper and cheaper, and in most ways better and better offerings by private space companies, while those deployed by NASA are still really solid and impressive, but incredibly slow and expensive to develop and deploy, in comparison.

This is also happening at a moment of heightened geopolitical competition in space, and one in which private entities are equipping the nation states that would have traditionally dominates this industry.

China’s space agency has enjoyed a flurry of moon-related successes in recent years, and many of these missions have relied at least in part on efforts by private, or pseudo-private, as tends to be the case in China, companies.

Business entities from all over the world are also regularly making the satellites and probes and components of landers that make these things work, so solar system exploration and space travel are no longer the exclusive wheelhouses of government agencies—the private sector is becoming a lot more influential in this area, and that’s led to some novel security issues, alongside massive swings in influence and power for the folks running these companies: perhaps most notably SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s increasing sway over governments and even inter-governmental conflict, due in part to his company’s space launch capabilities, and their capacity to beam internet down to conflict zones, earthside, via their StarLink satellite array.

So this is an area that’s heating up, both for earthbound and space-faring reasons, and the incentives and peculiarities of the private market are increasingly shaping the type of research and missions being conducted, while also changing the math of what’s possible, how quickly, and maybe even what level of risk is acceptable within a given mission or program.

Show Notes

https://www.cnn.com/science/live-news/moon-landing-blue-ghost-03-02-25/index.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakuto-R_Mission_1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakuto-R_Mission_2

https://spacenews.com/ae-industrial-partners-to-acquire-stake-in-firefly-from-noosphere/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_Alpha

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-selects-firefly-aerospace-for-artemis-commercial-moon-delivery-in-2023/

https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/22/18234604/firefly-aerospace-cape-canaveral-florida-launch-site-slc-20

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25861-next-generation-of-space-cowboys-get-ready-to-fly/

https://apnews.com/article/moon-landings-failures-successes-545ea2f3ffa5a15893054b6f43bdbb98

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/01/science/blue-ghost-firefly-mission-1-moon-landing.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_Aerospace

https://www.space.com/the-universe/moon/were-on-the-moon-private-blue-ghost-moon-lander-aces-historic-lunar-landing-for-nasa

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd9208qv1kzo

https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/us-firm-fireflys-blue-ghost-moon-lander-locks-lunar-touchdown-2025-03-02/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/26/science/intuitive-machines-second-moon-landing-launch-how-to-watch.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_south_pole

https://www.livescience.com/space/the-moon/how-far-away-is-the-moon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing

https://www.space.com/12841-moon-exploration-lunar-mission-timeline.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_24

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